I watched the 2016 election coverage at a dive bar in downtown South Bend, Indiana. As the returns in Wisconsin and Michigan came in, it became apparent that a buffoonish, racist creation of tabloids, TV, and Twitter was about to become president. The bar, Frank’s Place, sits on the edge of the city’s blighted downtown and its regulars are working- and lower-middle-class people, Black and white. The occasional group of grad students (like me, at the time) would congregate there too, but most people associated with nearby Notre Dame stay away. The vibe was unlike that at watch parties in the apartment buildings and bars of big cities. At Frank’s, there weren’t many liberals glued to the TV, agonizing over every new batch of votes. Nor were there rabid Trump supporters in our midst. No one actually cared that much. The sound was low on the TVs, and drinkers would come up to the bar to order and ask what was going on. When they found out they guffawed or raised their eyebrows, and then took their pitchers back to their tables. The bartenders were disappointed but not appalled. Meanwhile, we were downing beers and entering what felt like a new world.
In the immediate aftermath of Trump’s election, it seemed for a moment that some good might come of it. Maybe Democrats would realize that they couldn’t claim to stand up for the interests of the working class if they had naked disdain for so many of its members. Maybe they would put away their luxury identity politics, which most of the poor Black and immigrant voters they pretended to advocate for couldn’t actually afford. Maybe they would turn their backs on Wall Street and actually confront the unjust economic structure that the Obama administration had so efficiently shored up after 2008—and that had so clearly helped open the White House doors to a demagogue.
Instead, economic explanations for Trump support were dismissed as a myth. In their place came explanations based on a Russian plot and a resurgence of white supremacy, both with a degree of truth but framed in such a way as to excuse the failures of party elites. The “flyover states,” which had formerly been the butt of tired classist jokes, were suddenly transformed into “Trump Country,” a breeding ground for fascism. By 2020, stir crazy from a pandemic and four years of Trump’s race-baiting provocations, the party elite took the horrific murder of a poor Black man as—among other things—an occasion to double down on its exhausted identity politics.
But during the presidential primaries that year, a candidate had emerged from the Democratic party of old. His age would prove a catastrophic liability but it also made him wary of identity politics and connected him to a pre-neoliberal version of the party, one committed to principled intervention in the economy on behalf of workers. Biden’s economic agenda, influenced by the Bernie Sanders wing of the party, represented a genuine attempt to reckon with the forces that led to Trump: a defeated labor movement, unrestrained financialization and corporate concentration, exurban areas and small cities like South Bend hollowed out by globalization and neoliberalism.
In the end, Biden’s domestic reforms came up short for a variety of reasons: slim congressional majorities defeated needed provisions and ended COVID-era welfare programs; the administration’s public-investment approach was still too reliant on private subsidies and tax benefits; and inflation (exacerbated by corporate concentration) and a calamitous foreign policy overshadowed his accomplishments. Most of all, the president—in part because of his age but also, one suspects, because of a lack of real conviction—proved unable to articulate a compelling economic vision even amid new infrastructure projects, a rejuvenated antitrust movement, and small but significant gains in labor organizing.
Biden’s age also made his selection of a vice-presidential candidate in 2020 far more important than usual. But here he did make a serious concession to the party’s neoliberal progressives and chose a candidate with serious political weaknesses—newly demonstrated by her dysfunctional primary bid—who, insiders worried openly, would prove unable to effectively step in for him when needed. While diversity on the ticket is a worthy consideration, it has become clear that identity, and a particular professional-class understanding of it, is far more important to party leadership than it is to the party’s voters, including its Black and Latino voters. “I think he came to the conclusion that he should pick a Black woman,” former Senate majority leader Harry Reid said at the time, “They are our most loyal voters and I think that the Black women of America deserved a Black vice-presidential candidate.” It wasn’t the first or last time that party leadership would impute, with a patronizing essentialism, its own preoccupations to a voting base more concerned with material issues like prices, wages, and health care.
Kamala Harris was not the only reason Democrats lost on Tuesday. Even with an open primary and without the embarrassment of Biden’s prolonged exit from the stage, a stronger Democratic candidate would still have faced a difficult path thanks to Biden’s mixed legacy and an unfavorable environment for incumbent parties. Nevertheless, Harris’s doomed candidacy, like Hillary Clinton’s eight years ago, laid bare a fundamental hollowness in the party that the Biden presidency hadn’t been able to fill.
There were, of course, some minor lessons learned from Hillary Clinton’s failed campaign. Harris was careful to avoid the identity-politics framing that put voters off Clinton in 2016. There was hardly any mention of her race or gender, even when Trump did his best to make it an issue. Still, the same managerial ethos imbued Harris’s campaign. Her appearances were carefully managed; she leaned on fundraising, clichéd set pieces, and vibes; and her policy positions seemed carefully triangulated to appease various wings of the party, especially donors, rather than to excite swing voters or present a genuine vision. Instead of presenting workers with a path to economic empowerment, she assured Oprah that her economic plans were approved by Goldman Sachs, Moody’s, and the Wharton School of Business.
When her early momentum ran out, she pivoted to familiar warnings about Trump’s character and authoritarianism, and to partnerships with Never Trump Republicans like Liz Cheney—part of a misguided effort to win over suburban voters. At a time when the establishment is discredited and voters are pissed off, the “party of the people” aligned itself with warmongers, CEOs, and celebrities.
The attempt to create a new coalition combining suburban conservatives and the party’s traditional base of college-educated liberals and Black and Latino voters—memorably encapsulated by Chuck Schumer’s claim that every working-class vote lost in the heartland could be made up with two votes in the Republican suburbs—was more than just misguided. It reflected troubling changes in both the Democratic Party’s class composition and its understanding of politics. As Bernie Sanders emphasized in a statement after Harris’s loss, it was foolhardy to believe that Democrats could “abandon working class people” without being abandoned by “Latino and Black workers as well. While the Democratic leadership defends the status quo, the American people are angry and want change.”
As Democrats became the party of suburbanites and professionals, they also further professionalized politics itself. In the liberal imagination, politics, like so much else, became a matter of expert management. But parties are meant to mediate, not manage, conflict among the various interest groups that make up their coalitions. It is conflict and compromise that make up coalitions. They cannot be created by technocratic fiat from above and controlled by means of staged events and strategy sessions in tastefully decorated DC offices. Without mechanisms that mediate conflict and promote negotiation, including primaries—which the party increasingly seeks to manage and, this year, managed to avoid entirely—party elites become insulated from their voters, opportunities to change minds and develop ideas are lost, and voters themselves become disaffected.
If the working class is to become part of the Democratic Party coalition again, the frayed middle layers connecting elites and voters must be rebuilt. Working-class constituents must have access to the party’s collective deliberations. A party controlled by “big money interests and well-paid consultants,” as Sanders wrote, can only offer its ostensible voters a superficial and condescending form of representation of the kind Harry Reid wanted for Black women. Like a tottering corporation, the party can only seek to manage the perceptions and expectations of the various identity and interest groups it claims as its customers. But that isn’t politics; it’s public relations.
What, then, will it take for the Democratic Party to finally learn the lessons it failed to learn in 2016? The framing of the question may be entirely wrong. As Sanders also emphasized in his remarks, we cannot expect the party’s political operatives to learn lessons at all. A Democratic Party capable of responding to what Sanders called the “pain and political alienation” of its old working-class base would be a party structured completely differently. It would be capable not just of managing pain and conflict but of making the grassroots expression of discontent a part of its political process, translating that expression into an organic platform, and incorporating the expressers into a genuinely representative political coalition.
Absent that, Democratic politics, as well as democratic politics, will continue to seem like a remote prospect to the voters politicians claim to represent. Our elections will continue to draw apathy, cynicism, and outright nihilism. And the American project will continue to be vulnerable to conmen like Trump.
